November 28
Family,
Good to hear from you all again, as usual! Happy Birthday Joseph and Heather. Hopefully the game is Awesome Joseph! I don't know how good BYU is doing this year, but even if they get destroyed it will be a lot of fun haha. Congrats on winning a stuffed animal Laura! In the picture I sent last week I am not anywhere in the picture, so father the Widows mite t-shirt is being worn by E.Tanner. I am the one taking the photo. I am glad mother that you are taking such good care of my dog! I expect to see her healthy and well when I get home!
Thanksgiving was great! We went over to the Cheesmans and had a nice meal. They invited over all the missionaries in Kingston and the Mission President/wife. In total we had 13 people there. It was a lot of fun. We had everything American style and it was interesting to watch the Jamaican missionaries try all of our different foods, the tables had finally turned on them! Haha President Graff made home made stuffing, it was pretty good. Had pineapple in it. I forgot my camera at home so no picture today, but next week I will send a good picture of thanksgiving. It lasted about and hour and a half and then we went back to work.
Since I left my camera, and we are at the office emailing I figured I will send the next best thing-a spreadsheet! Haha I have been working on this one for a day or two. Every time a missionary has a baptism he gets a certificate. So missionaries just get this collection of certificates at the end of their mission. But what are we supposed to do with them? Make a piece of art? So we thought about it and decided it would be easier if each missionary just got one certificate at the end with every converts name on it. I wanted to make it as easy for sister cheesman as possible, so that she didn't have to go back and look up everything about each missionary at the end of their mission. I created this spreadsheet that has 3 different sheets in it. The first has each missionaries name, and then straight across in the same row you just type in the name of the converts as they come. The second sheet records convert information. As someone is baptized you type in the name and address. And finally the last sheet you just type in a missionary name into cell A9 and then it will automatically bring up all the converts for that missionary with information on them and already to print! When printed it is printed onto a fancy paper..not white paper. The third sheet was a pain to do initially. Everything I tried either had a limit as to how big it could be or if their wasn't any information it would just show a zero or a #N/A which I could just white out-except that the paper to be printed on is not white. So I spent a while working on that and now it is mostly working great! I also included a few small macros to alphabetize it all since it won't work unless it is in alphabetical order. Anyways, dad will probably find it more interesting then everyone else who is just rolling their eyes by now. Haha but you can have fun changing names on the third sheet between Elder Todd Tanner and Elder Bradford Talbert, those are the only two with any information in the sheet currently. I made it very simple and easy to use for sister cheesman and anyone else.
It has been a very calm week. President Graff's computer has been having internet problems but I don't know what is wrong. It has me completely baffled. I called the church guy in charge of computers in our area and he is now just as baffled as I am. We are thinking that something internally has just broke and that the piece will just have to be completely replaced. I have tried everything I have ever learned, and a lot of new things that I just learned, but no luck so far.
Hmmm-aside from Thanksgiving and the spreadsheet not much has happened. At church on Sunday somehow the hymn for the sacrament got messed up. The piano player was playing just fine but half of the congregation was 2 measures ahead of the other half. The piano was with the slower of the 2 groups. It was a mess, I was trying to conduct it but I was also trying very hard to not laugh during the song because of how ridiculous it sounded. All the missionaries realized the problem and were slightly laughing, but most of the members either didn't notice or they are just so use to it that they didn't mind haha.
At thanksgiving dinner they went around and asked what everyone was thankful for. Initially I thought of something really ridiculous and dumb, but then everyone before me (5 people, president graff and his wife, sister cheesman, elder Richards and elder mcgrath) all gave serious answers and tried to say something really meaningful. So about the time it got to me I was confused whether I should quickly think of something more in tune with everyone else, or just give my initial thought. After about 5 seconds of pondering that question I decided it was to much effort to rethink and I went with my initial thought. I was thankful that another year had gone by without Nuclear Warfare. It went over well-I think haha After me everyone went back to the more serious answers, except E. Cheesman, he was grateful for AC.
Christmas season has begun. Doesn't feel like it at all, still blazing hot, but some people have put up lights. I will watch for that package. We have begun to have a quite large pile in the office of Christmas packages. We are just keeping them here until Christmas eve when we will give them to all of the missionaries.
Funny story from last night. I was sitting at home, writing in my journal and the phone rang. E. Brown was asleep so I went and searched for the phone, answered it. It was E. Hill. He kept mumbling something and had to have him repeat it 6 or 7 times, sounded like he was saying that he had stuffed my leader-.and that made no sense at all. Finally he gave up and just asked me for permission to do something or other. Which made no sense either since I didn't know why he was asking me. Eventually we figured out that our district had become to big due to some changes and so they split it in half. President Graff made me the district leader, but forgot to tell me so I was completely baffled by E. Hill's request. Bleh, now I have to drive to portmore and conduct district meeting once a week plus other time consuming things as well as be a busy office elder at the same time.
Anyways, that will be interesting. Time runs short. So I will just finish up here. You will have to tell me more about your job once it all gets started dad. Hopefully things go well back home. I like laura how you are referring to the car as your car as if you own it-haha yea right! Have you figured out any more about school yet laura? Are any of your friends going up to that you will be rooming with? Well I love you all and hope the week is great! Life is going well here in Jamaica.
Elder Talbert
p.s. haha hopefully this wasn't to boring of an email, just got caught up in the whole spreadsheet thing.... :)
If you are intersted in viewing the spreadsheet please leave a comment and I will send it on to you.
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